Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks were a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) led by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov that split with the Mensheviks in 1903 at the Second Party Congress. The Bolsheviks were the progenitors of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, founded in 1912, and their victory over the White Army in the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923 allowed for them to establish the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks were both communist and socialist and sought to overthrow the autocratic regime of Nicholas II of Russia in a proletarian revolution, arguing that the revolution would be in alliance with the working classes and that it should occur immediately; the rival Mensheviks wanted to ally with the liberals in politics and fight against the Russian Empire's government in time. However, the Bolsheviks led the successful 1917 Russian Revolution, with the October events leading to the formation of the communist Russian SFSR and the eventual creation of the communist USSR in 1922. In the end, the Bolsheviks would be divided between Lenin's protees Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky after his death, and Stalin would have Trotsky and almost all of the "Old Bolsheviks" executed in the Great Purge of 1934-1938 to keep himself and his own generation in power.